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Putin expected to pay last respects to Russia’s venerated human rights activist

Russian President Vladimir Putin may attend a ceremony to pay his last respects to human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva

Lyudmila Alexeyeva Mikhail Metzel/TASS

Lyudmila Alexeyeva

© Mikhail Metzel/TASS

MOSCOW, December 10. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin may attend a ceremony to pay his last respects to human rights activist Lyudmila Alexeyeva, scheduled to take place on Tuesday, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

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"I don’t rule out such a possibility," he said when asked whether the president would attend the ceremony. "Especially, since tomorrow will be largely dedicated to human rights matters as a meeting of the Presidential Council for Civil Society and Human Rights will take place tomorrow," Peskov noted. "Certainly, it would be impossible not to pay our last respects to Lyudmila Alexeyeva on such a day," he added.

Alexeyeva was born on July 20, 1927. After graduating from Moscow State University’s Department of History in 1950, she worked as a history teacher and an editor at the Science publishing house, she was also a staff member of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. She became a human rights activist in 1966, and had to emigrate from the Soviet Union to the United States in 1977. Alexeyeva returned to Russia in 1993 and took the helm of the Moscow Helsinki Group in 1996. In 2002, she joined the Russian Presidential Commission for Human Rights, which was transformed into the Human Rights Council in 2004.

The wake for Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who passed away on Saturday at the age of 91, will take place at Moscow’s Central House of Journalists on December 11.

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